The United Nations is encouraging the use of open source. They see the value of open source software in helping with digital transformation, providing equitable access to technology, and accomplishing the world’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Last year they had an OSPOs for Good event, and the event went so well that this year it will be a week long UN Open Source Week 2025. In addition to the OSPO for Good day, they have added several other events including a 2 day hackathon for real world social good, “UN TECHover”. This builds on the success they’ve seen with hackathons.
At last year’s OSPO for Good, numerous hackathons spoke about their positive experience:
- Reboot the Earth, partnership between the Office of Information and Communications Technology, United Nations, the Digital Public Good Alliance and Salesforce. It’s been held since 2019. Last year, they held 5 hackathons, for in geographical locations plus one virtual. Young people are working on solutions to solve some of our biggest climate change challenges.
- The TED AI conference in San Francisco included an open source hackathon focused on SDGs. They had 30 teams that submitted over 90 proposals.
- The Cloud Native Hack at KubeCon in Paris had 13,000 developers focused on UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
You can watch last year’s OSPO for Good talks. One of the talks I found very inspiring was Philip Thigo, MBS‘s talk about how open source software brought financial inclusion (mobile money) and mapping (OpenStreetMap) and the software industry to Kenya. It enables kids without university degrees in the Global South to learn to code and to participate in building collaborative software with the world.
One of the requests from last year’s event was a UN manifesto that would allow individuals and other organizations to rally behind and express support. They recently posted the United Nations Open Source Principles. The OSI was the first organization to endorse them.
You can read a report of last year’s event or sign up for this year’s.